Board of Directors

Armando Valladares – Chairman
A living symbol of resistance, steadfast conviction, and unbendable perseverance, Mr. Valladares is Cuba’s most famous prisoner of conscience. As a punishment for his honesty and courage, Mr. Valladares spent 22 years in Cuba's prisons, where he was subjected to the most inhumane conditions, including daily torture, forced labor, and solitary confinement. It was only after much international pressure and a personal plea from French president François Mitterrand to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro that Mr. Valladares was released in 1982. He subsequently published his memoirs in the international best-seller Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro’s Gulag, and campaigned ceaselessly to expose the plight of Castro's political prisoners. After his release, Mr. Valladares was appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, where his focus on Cuba led to the exposure of Castro's horrific prison system. Ambassador Valladares also co-founded Resistance International and is currently chairman of the Valladares Project, an international children’s rights advocacy nonprofit. President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Citizen’s Medal

Thor Halvorssen – President and CEO
A lifelong civil liberties advocate and film producer, Mr. Halvorssen is President of the Human Rights Foundation. Mr. Halvorssen was the first Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a free speech group he headed from its founding in 1999 until he stepped down in 2004 to create HRF. Mr. Halvorssen is the founder of the Moving Picture Institute and the producer of several feature films and documentaries that focus on human freedom including Freedom's Fury (executive produced with Quentin Tarantino and Lucy Liu), Indoctrinate U, and Hammer & Tickle (2006 winner of the Zurich Film Festival). He is a contributing author to several books about freedom. Halvorssen graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with concurrent undergraduate and graduate degrees in history. [more]

Ron Jacobs

Ronald Jacobs is a regulatory attorney in Washington, D.C. with the law firm of Venable LLP. He provided pro bono counsel to Thor Halvorssen to incorporate the Human Rights Foundation and to secure its tax exempt status, and he and his firm continue to provide legal counsel to the Foundation. Mr. Jacobs was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and he received his Bachelor of Arts in International Affairs from George Washington University. After college, he worked for Congressman Steve Chabot, a member of the House International Relations Committee. Mr. Jacobs received his law degree from George Washington University Law School, where he received the Imogene Williford Award for his studies in constitutional law; served as Articles Editor for the George Washington Law Review; and was a member of the Order of the Coif. Mr. Jacobs is married to Julie Brennan Jacobs and has a young son, Charlie.

Eduardo Mendoza
A 1941 agricultural engineering graduate of Argentina's Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Mr. Mendoza was the youngest cabinet minister in Venezuelan history. As Secretary of Agriculture, he headed the Venezuelan Institute for Immigration and enthusiastically embraced the creation of the International Refugee Organization in 1946 (this body was later replaced by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). Mendoza succeeded, despite fierce opposition within the cabinet, in ensuring that Venezuela would aid European refugees and displaced persons who could not or would not return home after World War II; he assumed responsibility for the legal protection and resettlement of tens of thousands of refugees inside Venezuela. A lifelong scientific researcher, he was elected to the Andean Parliament in 2000, serving until 2001. He is the great-grandson of Venezuela’s first President, Cristóbal Mendoza, and the great-grand-nephew of Venezuela's liberator, Simón Bolívar.

Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr.
Dr. Pfaltzgraff is Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of International Security Studies at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, where he founded and is president of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. Dr. Pfaltzgraff has advised key U.S. officials on foreign policy and arms control policy; he has also published extensively and lectured widely at government, industry, and academic forums in the United States and overseas on subjects ranging from international law to nuclear disarmament.

Robert A. Sirico
President and co-founder of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, Rev. Sirico tirelessly promotes the ideal of a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty and human rights. He is a leading voice in free-enterprise education, liberty, and respect for human rights, and is especially committed to combining religious studies with analysis of economic principles in order to enable students to understand and address poverty and other pressing social problems. Rev. Sirico has traveled extensively in order to study firsthand regimes that violate human rights; China, Cuba, and Venezuela have all drawn his analytical attention. He has published and lectured widely on the role faith plays in promoting human rights as well as on how trade sanctions impair efforts to end human rights violations. Rev. Sirico served on the Michigan Civil Rights Commission from 1994 to 1998, and is a member of the Mont Pelerin Society.

Board of Advisors

Charles H. Hoeflich
Charles H. Hoeflich is President Emeritus of the Univest Corporation. He is a philanthropist who, for fifty years, has labored as a moral, financial, and practical guiding light to numerous charities and their leadership. He lives in Bucks County, PA.

Michael J. Horowitz
As senior fellow and director of the Hudson Institute’s Project for Civil Justice Reform and its Project for International Religious Liberty, Mr. Horowitz was among the first public intellectuals to raise awareness about the persecution of Christians in the Sudan. He has been a leader in the movement to reform U.S. government policy on human rights, promoting Congressional legislation on religious freedom in the Sudan, human trafficking, North Korea, and prison reform. Mr. Horowitz has also done extensive work promoting democracy in Eastern Europe, Cambodia, and Vietnam. He earned his LL.B. from Yale Law School.

Roy Innis
An ardent civil rights advocate, Mr. Innis is known for the integrity with which he has carried on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy. As national chairman and CEO of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), one of the nation's most storied civil rights groups, Mr. Innis is credited with improving the lives of millions of Americans. CORE organized the Freedom Rides of the 1960s, and Mr. Innis personally drafted the Community Self-Determination Bill of 1968, the first bill introduced into Congress by a black organization. Recognized in the United States as a defender of victims’ rights, Mr. Innis has also dedicated himself to African liberation movements, establishing a CORE chapter in Kenya and becoming the first United States citizen to attend the Organization of African Unity in an official capacity. He has reported to the U.S. Congress on many African elections and on the state of human rights in Africa.

Tom G. Palmer
A senior fellow at the Cato Institute and director of Cato University, Dr. Palmer received a doctorate from Oxford University and lectures frequently on the history of liberty and constitutionalism, globalization and free trade, individualism, public choice, and the moral and legal foundations of human rights. A lifelong advocate for human rights in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Dr. Palmer has traveled throughout the region, holding seminars and smuggling in books, cash, photocopiers, and fax machines; he is also dedicated to translating and publishing textbooks on human rights and democracy in various central and eastern European languages. He is currently working on several human rights-oriented education programs in the Middle East, including an Arabic-language web site devoted to explaining and promoting democracy. Dr. Palmer has worked with the Liberty Fund, the Council on Public Policy, and the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, which in 2005 named him to its International Freedom Corps.